Civil Defence Evacuation Planning

Fear mongers must seek to censor free speech and engineer a climate of hateful lies that inspire murders and violence, not factual debates that lead to progress, education and peace, and to party political or Marxist driven hate attacks on civil defence that could help to protect Syrians and others under attack instead of having them driven out of their own country by fear and violence without any effective protection. Is that peace?

U.S. President John F. Kennedy worked in the American Embassy in London in 1939, and he wrote in his first ever book, Why England Slept, that public apathy in England towards civil defence encouraged fascist aggression by sending Hitler the message that Britain was unprepared to really threaten to stop the Nazis:

"In England we can see vividly where democracy failed. In the case of A.R.P. [Air Raid Precautions, later renamed civil defence], for example, the Government failed to get enough volunteers until after the Munich crisis had driven home the seriousness of the situation. But Germany had 12,000,000 members by 1936 ... We cannot tell anyone to keep out of our hemisphere unless our armaments and the people behind these armaments [emphasis by Kennedy] are prepared to back up the command ..."

For this reason, Kennedy refused in Why England Slept to place the blame for Nazi appeasement on the Prime Minister (Chamberlain). Kennedy quotes Herbert Morrison, the Labour Leader in 1939, as follows (describing as follows the severe Labour Party abuse he received about civil defence, the main objections being completely paranoid and to a certain extent also contradictory, namely that (1) civil defence is obviously so very effective it will produce a war psychology, intimidating Hitler, and that (2) civil defence is obviously so very ineffective that it is a complete fraud):

"At the beginning I got plenty of abuse from the irresponsibles because I said that Labour administrators must play their full part in Air Raid Precautions, which was denounced as a fraud and a plot of Ministers to create war psychology. For Labour local authorities to cooperate with state departments in this task was treachery. Anyway, no Air Raid Precautions could possibly be effective [the quacks alleged]."

Some Aspects of Shelter And Evacuation Policy To Meet H Bomb Threat

Declassified Secret 1954 report by Edward Leader-Williams of the U.K. Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch, pointing out how to use a combination of city centre evacuation and blast/fallout sheltering of the evacuated personnel to avoid casualties or coercion in a crisis from five 20 megaton thermonuclear bombs (100 megatons total). The copy of this secret turned into PDF format was the one issued to William Strath (Cabinet War Plans Secretariat) who used it in his March 1955 report "Defence Implications of Fall-Out from a Hydrogen Bomb", which Strath and Sir Normal Brook discussed with Defence Secretary Harold Macmillan on 24 March 1955 (the following quotations from the meeting report are from U.K. National Archives report CAB 130/109, "GEN.491/1st Meeting, Defence Implications of Fall-Out from a Hydrogen Bomb, 24 March 1955"):

"The Meeting first examined the report's proposals on evacuation which were based on the promise that a wider distribution of the population would reduce the number of casualties. ... The meeting were informed that, while it was not possible to provide effective shelter within the vicinity of a hydrogen bomb, it would be practicable to provide adequate shelter against fall-out beyond the area of devastation by blast. Scientific thinking was at present moving towards the view that brick-built houses would give better protection against fallout than had previously been thought. A trench with overhead earth cover would make more effective shelter but it would be a damp and uncomfortable place in which to have to stay until the radio-activity had abated. It was hoped that future research would devise a refuge room giving adequate protection which could be constructed in the ordinary house. If this could be done, house-holders could be advised what steps they could themselves take to secure satisfactory protection."

The Strath report, far from condemning "Protect and Survive" type improvised civil defence for personnel evacuated from the centre of target cities, did the very opposite. This is directly contrary to what many British political academics and historians have chosen to "read into" the Strath report.

By evacuating the central areas of cities near the fireball and crater, and sheltering the evacuated people from the heat (which is largely stopped by the city skyline shadowing effect anyway, except for upper floors of very high buildings, facing the fireball), blast and fallout, all casualties could be avoided, in accurately-placed 20 megaton surface bursts on cities. With the much smaller MIRV warheads (around 200 kt) or terrorist/clandestine threat (around 10 kt) today, the situation is even more positive as based on a re-evaluation of civil defence in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (Since blast waves travel over large distances averaging only about a quarter of a mile per second, there is plenty of time to "duck and cover" to avoid blast wind displacement and flying debris.) On 1 September 1939, two days before Britain declared war, it evacuated children from London. This was partly about sending a deliberate political message or "signal" to the enemy about the seriousness of the ultimatum, and partly as partial insurance against a surprise "knockout blow" air strike. Herman Kahn made the point in 1976 congressional hearings (included in the appended documents to the report linked here) that evacuation and improvised shelter are more credible than surprise attacks, because we have a protected second-strike retaliation capacity (submarines at sea) which takes away any incentive for a nuclear 9/11 or Pearl Harbor type surprise attack. Leader-Williams concludes that even in the worst case, the fatalities in 100 megaton nuclear attack on Britain that tried to target the evacuated (dispersed) population could be kept to 2% of the population by a combination of shelters and evacuation from the crater and fireball or severe blast area, leaving 98% of the population alive. In 1955, Leader-Williams drafted the first U.K. Home Office "Protect and Survive"-type indoor "inner refuge" improvised fallout shielding advice, as documented in detail in Dr Smith's paper, "Architects of Armageddon: the Home Office Scientific Advisers' Branch and civil defence in Britain, 1945-68", British Journal for the History of Science, vol. 43 (2010), pp. 149-80.

Edward Leader-Williams, an engineer, was Lord Baker's assistant during the invention and testing of the indoor "Morrison shelter" in World War II, which proved vital and highly effective against V1 attacks. Other relevant declassified documents are appended. Discussion and links to references: http://glasstone.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/dtriac-dispatch-volume-3-issue-2.html

For further discussion of Hiroshima firestorm causes (a detailed, factual propaganda debunking that the populist anti-nuclear media ignores) please see: https://archive.org/details/TheEffectsOfTheAtomicBombOnHiroshima

Some myths debunked

1. On 1 September 1939 as Germany invaded Poland, prior to declaring war on Germany we began the train based evacuation of one and a half million kids from target cities.

2. Despite the fact that German bombers could reach Britain faster than evacuation could occur, this did not provoke a "knockout blow" against the dispersing trains of evacuees. On the contrary, by reducing British city vulnerability by a combination of evacuating vulnerable people and by issuing gas masks and shelters, bombing was delayed for nearly a year.

3. Evacuation again occurred during the actual Blitz air raids, which were equivalent, in damage and casualty risks (which don't scale linearly with energy yield), to four separate one megaton bombs dropped on London (London alone received about 18.8 kilotons in roughly 188 thousand separate 100 kg explosives in the 1940 Blitz: 188,000(10-7)2/3 = 4 thermonuclear weapons, each 1 megaton, a provable physics fact way beyond Jeremy Corbyn's CND and the popular media), in late 1940, and also during the V1 cruise missile and finally V2 IRBM attacks which peaked with over a million evacuated in September 1944 (see official history graph above, which is from: Richard Titmuss, Problems of social policy, 1950, page 356).

4. In Hiroshima, there was no evacuation, and the bureaucratic politics of issuing the air raid warning prevented it being sounded in time to get people into shelters which survived. Most burns could have been avoided by duck and cover, because they were flash (profile) burns, not firestorm burns. Also in Syria, most of the casualties in the civil war are occurring because there is no organized effective evacuation and sheltering: a lack of civil defence. Similarly, we invaded Iraq with enormous casualties and expense because Tony Blair avoided the relatively cheap war-proof-tested civil defence corps solution which his predecessor Clement Attlee used in 1949 in response to the Russian nuclear threat. It would have been cheaper and safer to restart the civil defence corps against the hyped up threat of Saddam's sarin nerve gas in Scud missiles. But Tony Blair had been deluded as a CND member by propaganda that civil defence is a fraud, and ignored civil defence as a credible alternative to a costly war. The blame is with anti-civil defence CND.

5. Contrary to Fred Kaplan's and CND's anti-civil defence evacuation ranting, the protected second strike nuclear deterrent prevents an aggressor from gaining by a first strike, so evacuation remains practical. As in 1939, where we evacuated kids from London and other cities in Operation Pied Piper on 1 September before declaring war on 3 September, city evacuation is not a race against enemy bombers or V1/V2/ICBM missiles which arrive in a matter of minutes.

In any case, the British Civil Defence Corps 1957 publication Radioactive fallout: provisional scheme of public control planned evacuation of heavy fallout "Z Zone" areas downwind after the explosions not before them (where the dose rate is above 1000 R/hr at 1 hour after burst, or 10 R/hr at 48 hours, allowing for the correct decay rate). Likewise, in WWII plans were made to evacuate areas contaminated with slowly-evaporating mustard gas, and where the houses were totally destroyed by heavy bombing (while people were in shelters). Hence, the speed of a missile is irrelevant, and does not "ridicule" evacuation plans. (CND attacks on evacuation planning often end with the sneer that the traffic jams on the roads out of any city on a Friday afternoon before a Bank Holiday weekend somehow debunk evacuation planning. On the contrary, they prove that huge numbers do migrate regularly without any coordination or planning, and in a coordinated, properly planned for emergency situation, broken down or crashed vehicles can easily be shunted to the sides of major roads to clear major congestion bottlenecks and save lives.)

6. The Jeremy Corbyn style of politically biased, fanatically ignorance based propaganda to "shut down the argument" just proves where he can't defend himself with rational truth. We should be spreading our wartime proved civil defence information and help to all war zones to avert the refugee crises, instead of using pseudo "socialist" hate attacks on the truth from deluded folks who are effectively warmongers, since they are against credible deterrence (a stance which has led to the wars) and their hate-propaganda supports racist terrorists: https://glasstone.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/politically-biased-science-nature-peer.html

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